Unboxious

Today I finished Fruits Basket (2019). It was good, but not as great as I’d hoped. I’d recommend it to anyone who wants to watch a bunch of sad teenagers for a while.

Ayame (the snake) is the best character, and it’s not even close.

I’m also not sure they don’t

I mean, Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust is definitely not rated PG. Maybe when the company was founded that was the goal, and it just kinda drifted over time.

They’d have to import the equipment and materials to manufacture them, and those things also have tariffs. All this to deal with a tax that might end up disappearing after this year’s midterm elections.

For that reason, I kinda feel like banning it on the basis that it encourages smoking is misguided.

Perhaps it’s less about whether it encourages smoking and more about whether it runs afoul of laws concerning the depiction of real-life cigarette brands on TV. I don’t know Taiwanese advertising law though!

It’s okay but tbh I could name five other currently airing anime that are better.

Okay, the logo bouncing around at the end like a DVD player’s sleep screen got me.

We should all be more like Bravern.

Sure, there’s plenty of great stuff on Crunchyroll.

If you want new stuff:

• Journal With Witch
• Daemons of the Shadow Realm
• You and I Are Polar Opposites
• Jaadugar: A Witch in Mongolia
• Golden Kamuy (animation can be rough with this one but I promise the story is something else)

Classics:

• Akira
• Mobile Suit Gundam
• Gurren Lagann

Extremely gay:

• Brave Bang Bravern!

Is there any particular genre you’re looking for?

Really it’s all about execution; for example Konosuba isn’t all that different in terms of its premise but the quality of the writing is a million times better.

I chuckled when everyone was basically saying they’re hundreds of years old. Subaru is the baby in the room.

Same! Do you think even pre-memory Subaru knew how old Emilia is?

Man, Subaru is such a pushover. Insane loli tells him to give up on getting his memories back, and he just about goes along with it. Rem shows up and tells him he’s her hero and to snap out of it and he’s like, “I don’t know who this is but she’s hot so I guess I’ll lock in.”

Nah, people tend to use ‘mid’ as an insult, but describing these shows that way is too generous. They’re so damn generic you didn’t even feel the need to name specific titles.

least liked popular streaming service.

Oh, HiDive is far worse. Crunchyroll may a master of the footgun, but at least its website works the majority of the time.

I guess you did say “popular” though.

Honestly I don’t feel like I usually see bland shows getting that kind of hate. It mostly seems to be that a lot of people will ignore the show, and then if it has some merits it’ll also have a dedicated glazing squad. Even with Demon Slayer I mostly see people saying it’s overrated, not that it’s actually bad.

I watched the first 35 or so episodes of Fruit Basket (2019). It feels very much like I’m watching the thing Ouran High School Host Club was made to parody. I liked the first season (especially episode 21) quite a lot. The second season seems to focus a lot more on the Soma family drama with the head being a crazy asshole, and I just don’t find myself super interested in that.

Apart from that, I’ve also gotten caught up on The Elusive Samurai Season 2. If anything it’s even wackier than the first season, with live-action puppetry or just straight footage being used for a couple of shots. Overall it’s been lots of fun.

There’s some worldbuilding stuff in S3 that was just so poorly executed I couldn’t believe it.

:::spoiler MHA S3 In the third season they take an exam to get their provisional hero licenses. We learn that in order to respond to the increased villain threat, the target pass rate of the exam has been changed from 50% to 5%. This is ridiculous. What effect would this even have? Of course the most obvious is that a bunch of (presumably) future heroes aren’t going to be able to participate in internships now, and will lose out on valuable on-the-job training. Assuming they also made the exam to get the full license harder as well, they’re creating a disaster. They’ve just raised a bunch of teenagers, trained them in combat, and then yanked away the job prospects for all but the absolute best, while also drastically cutting law enforcement recruitment. What exactly do they think is going to happen?! :::

Anyways, things like that where it feels strongly like the author didn’t think about what he was writing at all killed all enthusiasm I had for this series.

I love that some of the special effects were literally just a photo of a piece of plastic!

Honestly I’m not sure I have any. Life is too short to rewatch something I’m not certain I’ll find immensely enjoyable.

Because Divers gave us Re:Rise & had really good gunpla designs

I guess if that’s your primary metric I can’t deny I liked the Tequila Custom that Build Divers brought us.

Right? Build Fighters was incredibly charming, but Divers is genuinely one of the worst things I’ve ever seen. I think the AI girl the MC was simping over would’ve had more personality if she were written by an LLM!

Still a bit of a wait to go, but I’m in no rush; there’s always more excellent stuff to watch these days.

The bits that I’ve seen have indeed been terrible, but I think it’s important to be able to point at Amazon and laugh.

I read those last four words and all I can think is “Oh, so they’re saying they will continue to hire sex offenders and major human rights violators. Wonderful.”

I’m kinda surprised tbh. My memory is The Promised Neverland manga is that it started out strong but each successive arc seemed worse than the last. I’d like to believe this will be good, but I’m not especially hopeful.

Did anyone even enjoy watching this?

I mean, sort of. The writing is truly mediocre, but I’m watching it because I think the cinematography is funny. Certainly not good, but funny. It’s like they have this weird compulsion to always be moving the camera into the strangest place possible, and then picking a new and even stranger place for it to go once it gets there. It’s trash, but it’s bizarre and unique trash and I can appreciate that.

I can’t imagine they paid Amazon for the license for that, if it’s even copyrightable.

Incidentally, do you know if anyone preserved that? As far as I can tell it’s lost media.

Wotakoi is my top choice, and comes packaged with a top-tier manga.

Tokyo Godfathers also portrays a realistic adult life, for a certain sort of adult anyways.

Every time I watch a new episode of this I’m blown away. I loved Stand-Alone Complex, but I think this beats it for me.

Where are you seeing that? I’m seeing two different authors for the manga and two different studios for the anime. Do they have the same director or something?

Mechs on surfboards is just cool.